Eddie Perfect may have grown up in Melbourne, Australia, but that didn’t stop him from falling in love with Broadway.

“When I was about eight years old, my dad taped the cast recording of Sweeney Todd onto two cassettes and then put them into the tape deck of our kombi van that we used to drive around on school holidays going camping in Melbourne ... and we would listen to Sweeney Todd,” he recalls in the video above. “And I fell in love with the combination of music and theatre and storytelling.”

Now Perfect is represented by two scores on Broadway this past season: King King and Beetlejuice, the latter of which earned him a Tony nomination for Best Original Score.

“With Beetlejuice I just threw everything into the pot and mixed it up,” Perfect told Playbill on his opening night. “I think in his opening number alone [Beetlejuice] sings across 12 different styles.

“When I got the script, Beetlejuice was already super surprising on the page. He was dynamic. Sometimes he was seducing and sometimes he was abolishing. He was a crazy demon. I just wanted to write a musical genre for every one of his personalities.”

And Beetlejuice isn’t the only one who is surprising. Though Sweeney Todd may be the most influential musical for Perfect, the musical theatre song he’ll never get sick of comes from the opposite end of the spectrum. Talk about dynamic.